Category archive: Movies

I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier. My bank, however, doesn’t like this. Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work. In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them. So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on. Bye bye Tesco. In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home. But, I like the exercise. In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do. Good.

All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:

One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars. And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are. Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century. Who the hell are you? Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?

Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it. The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers. That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.

Yes, I don’t think I’ll ever get totally tired to taking photos of photoers, like the ones below, all taken during a recent walk with my friend Tony (who is GodDaughter2’s Dad) along Victoria Street, past Westminster Abbey and Parliament, and then on over the River and past the Wheel.

Lots of woolly hats and gloves and furry clothes, and hair. I especially like how the hair of the lady in 2.2 is lit up green, and also a bit of red.

Click and enjoy:

Seven smartphones. Two old school cameras, like my one. Smartphones have totally swallowed the dedicated-but-little camera market, although you do still see them around.

Well, I’m making some progress on the Wordpress front, and there will be a new BMblog, but meanwhile, the last of the photos I want to show you that I took on Jan 5. I took the tube back home, but chose to get out at Victoria rather than Pimlico, probably to try to buy the Gramophone, which I can now, near to me, only buy there. And because I did that, I was able to feast my eyes on this:

That is the late afternoon sun crashing through where the trains go in an out, and bouncing off various reflective surfaces.

I like how this kind of scene permits bright colours, like those little union jacks, but turns fainter colours monochrome, like when that little girl in a red coat appears in Schindler’s List.

I particularly like this little part of the scene:

What I love about sights like that is the way the sun turns those lights on. No electricity is involved. It’s pure sunlight.

At the time I took that photo, in Lower Marsh, I was with someone else, and just grabbed the shot before moving on at once. But I reckon it came out really well.

Wikipedia tells us of Mickey Mouse’s compiucated origin. He was a replacement for a rabbit, and before a mouse was arrived at, it seems that many other animals were considered:

Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character created by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer who distributed product through Universal Studios. In the spring of 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Universal owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney’s current employees to his new contract. Angrily, Disney refused the deal and returned to produce the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney was dismayed at the betrayal by his staff but determined to restart from scratch. The new Disney Studio initially consisted of animator Ub Iwerks and a loyal apprentice artist, Les Clark, who together with Wilfred Jackson were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. One lesson Disney learned from the experience was to thereafter always make sure that he owned all rights to the characters produced by his company.

In the spring of 1928, Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. A male frog was also rejected. It would later show up in Iwerks’ own Flip the Frog series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney. “Mortimer Mouse” had been Disney’s original name for the character before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, and ultimately Mickey Mouse came to be.

Those two paragraphs are, at Wikipedia, crammed with links. Follow the link above and scroll down to where it says “Origin”, if you want to follow any of these links.

I will, however, honour the amazingly named Ub Iwerks with a link from here. I wonder how he was pronounced. His dad was from Germany, and I think I know how they’d have said the name there. But, Ub (!?!) was born in Kansas. When it came to Amercans pronouncing foreign names, all bets were off. My guess is there were lots of Germans where the Iwerks family grew up, and thus it was not felt necessary to do any name changing.

For ages now, I’ve had these two pictures hovering about on my screen waiting to be put next to each other on my blog and then forgotten about, because they look quite like each other:

But, do they look enough like each other for it to be interesting? Maybe not. But there are times when you have to say to yourself: It’s only blogging.

On the left: Shakib-Al-Hasan, noted Bangladesh cricket allrounder. On the right, what he will turn into when a little bit older, or would if he had whiter skin: noted American actor Gary Sinise. Photos found here and here.

A computer was trained to look through the data from the Kepler space telescope, and look for signals that might belong to planets. And it found new planets within existing systems, by spotting signals that seemed to indicate something of interest but were too weak to have been spotted by humans.

That suggests that there might be whole worlds and solar systems hiding within the data we’ve already collected, but which we had not noticed because there are simply so many signals to pick through. Kepler has collected four-years of data from looking at the sky and 150,000 stars – far more than humans could ever look through.

So, exactly what were these weak signals?

The new planets – just like all of the thousands found by Kepler – were spotted by watching the sky for light coming from the stars. When planets pass in front of their stars, scientists can register the dimming as they go, and use the speed and characteristics of that dimming to work out what the solar system might actually look like.

Much of that work relies on pattern recognition, which until now has been done by scientists looking through the data. But the new findings are the result of work between Nasa and Google, which trained machine learning algorithms to learn to spot those patterns itself and so pick through the data much more quickly.

This is good. Keep Skynet busy with harmless hobbies.

Maybe not. Getting Skynet to compile a huge and exhaustive list of all the places in the universe where biology-based life might be, after biology-based life on this planet has been taken care of.

This is maybe how the robot holocaust will happen. We will have been telling them to “take care of” us and our fellow creatures. But they’ll have been watching too many gangster movies, and ...

Today I was in central London. It wasn’t good photoing weather. Grim and grey and wet. But I did take this photo:

At the time, I thought I was photoing an army of Santas. For some reason I find the photoing of large numbers of similar or identical objects, in a big clump or clutch, to be rather satisfying.

But it turned out I was photoing two British Personal Brands With Huge Global Reach, namely The Queen, as performed by Elizabeth Windsor, and Mr Bean, as performed by Rowan Atkinson.

A lot of their appeal is that these are both characters who do a lot of physical stuff, rather than characters who talk a lot. Neither Elizabeth Windsor nor Rowan Atkinson are stupid or inarticulate people. On the contrary both are notable wordsmiths, blessed with famously subtle senses of humour. Nevertheless, the Queen’s daily repertoire of stuff is adopting Royal poses and walking or being driven about Royally and making Royal gestures and doing Royal things like shaking hands with a line of lesser celebrities. And Mr Bean mostly makes faces and does pratfalls. These are things that anyone on earth can see – see - the point of with great ease. You don’t have to know a word of English to get what The Queen or Mr Bean are all about. And if only a tiny percentage of the world’s populace like what they see of these two characters, that is still a lot of people.

You see Queen and Bean together, in effigy, in tourist crap shops, a lot. That I photoed the two of them accidentally is no, as it were, accident.

There are two places in London where I regularly encounter antique cars, in other words the sort of cars that were new at the time when I was a new human being. One of these places is Lower Marsh, where there are regular convocations of such cars, which I have regularly bumped into when shopping at Gramex for second hand CDs, which was until very recently in Lower Marsh.

And the other place where antique cars can often been seen is outside the Regency Cafe, which is about two minutes walk away from where I live. Antique cars congregate there in order to contribute to television shows or films set in olden times, the self-consciously dated Regency Cafe being a regular location for such dramas.

I recall being rather surprised to encounter these two ancient Austins were doing, even nearer to where I live than the Regency Cafe, in the summer of 2013. What are they do? Answer: they had been or about to be performing outside the Regency Cafe. Enjoy:

I am meeting someone tomorrow morning at the Regency Cafe. I haven’t actually used this place very often, other than to photo old cars and showbiz activity outside it, but I think I will eat in it rather more in the future.

Words make for entertaining photos. The words in signs. The “words” in graffiti.

I was out and about today, and here are a couple of the more amusing photos I took.

There was this, involving two glamorous women:

And this, involving another quite glamorous woman:

The first photo was taken through a shop window in Lower Marsh. That quote about Hell seems to be generic, so presumably that’s a generic woman. I had supposed it to be somebody in particular, in the way that Marilyn Monroe is somebody in particular. But, it seems not.

The second photo was taken at the southern entrance of the Peake Street graffiti tunnel. An entrance that now looks like this:

The graffiti in the tunnel, which goes under Waterloo Station, is constantly changing. Here is how some of it was looking today:

Apart from recognising a couple of Hulks there, the incredible one and Homwer Simpson, this is all a mystery to me. As I think I’ve said here before, graffiti like this has in common with Modern Art of the more usual sort in being incomprehensible to outsiders.

At the other end of the Peake Street graffiti tunnel, there is a big notice which tells everyone what the graffiti rules are.

I know what you’re thinking. Good luck with that. And if you are thinking that, you are not wrong:

Life is Beautiful!! Hm. Not so sure. But then, I am in two minds about graffiti. It’s threatening, but stylish. One moment I like how it looks. At other moments, it feels like visual bullying.

If anyone knows what this notice now says (I’m talking about the big purple “word” there), please leave a comment.

I recently quoted a big chunk from Ross King’s book The Judgement of Paris, about his number one lead character, Ernest Meissonier.

Here are a few paragraphs by King, a few pages later, on page 17 of my edition of this book, about the Paris Salon. They begin with a reference to King’s number two lead character, Édouard Manet:

Not until 1859, when he was twenty-seven years old, did Manet feel himself ready to launch his career at the Paris Salon, or “The Exhibition of Living Artists,” as it was more properly called. This government-sponsored exhibition was known as the “Salon” since for many years after its inauguration in 1673 it had taken place in the Salon Carré, or Square Room, of the Louvre. By 1855 it had moved to the more capacious but less regal surroundings of the Palais des Champs-Élysées, a cast-iron exhibition hall (formerly known as the Palais de l’Industrie) whose floral arrangements and indoor lake and waterfall could not disguise the fact that, when not hosting the Salon, it accommodated equestrian competitions and agricultural trade fairs.

The Salon was a rare venue for artists to expose their wares to the public and - like Meissonier, its biggest star - to make their reputations. One of the greatest spectacles in Europe, it was an even more popular attraction, in terms of the crowds it drew, than public executions. Opening to the public in the first week of May and running for some six weeks, it featured thousands of works of art specially - and sometimes controversially - chosen by a Selection Committee. Admission on most afternoons was only a franc, which placed it within easy reach of virtually every Parisian, considering the wage of the lowest-paid workers, such as milliners and washerwomen, averaged three to four francs a day. Those unwilling or unable to pay could visit on Sundays, when admission was free and the Palais des Champs-Élysées thronged with as many as 50,000 visitors - five limes the number that had gathered in 1857 to watch the blade of the guillotine descend on the neck of a priest named Verger who had murdered the Archbishop of Paris. In some years, as many as a million people visited the Salon during its six-week run, meaning crowds averaged more than 23,000 people a day.

At the bottom of the page, King adds this illuminating footnote:

To put these figures into context, the most well-attended art exhibition in the year 2003 was Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the course of a nine-week run, the show drew an average of 6,863 visitors each day, with an overall total of 401,004. El Greco, likewise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, averaged 6,897 per day during its three-month run in 2003-4, ultimately attracting 174,381 visitors. The top-ranked exhibition of 2002, Van Gogh and Gauguin, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, drew 6,719 per day for four months, with a final attendance of 739,117.

So it is with all Art, with a capital A. Arts start out as mere arts, in this case the art of picture making. But then, a particular technique that for a long time dominates the art in question gets elbowed aside by new technology. At which point the art in question becomes Art, of the High sort, the sort that all those crowds of mere people are no longer so interested in. They have other entertainents to divert them.

In the case of the art of painting pictures, the new technology was of course photography - still photography, but most especially photography of the moving sort. Motion pictures, in that telling phrase used by the pioneers of the new art.

When I read the paragraphs I have quoted above, I found myself thinking: Hollywood.

Just the one photo here today, today being a busy day for me. I have a meeting this evening to prepare for, in my living room. And because today is a Friday, which is the day of the week when I often feature animals of various kinds, this photo is a good choice, featuring as it does, two lions:

Although this memorial is much photoed, that’s an angle on it that you don’t see quite so much. This is the sort of photo that it is easy to take only if your camera has a twiddly screen, to enable you to hold your camera very low, but still know what you are photoing. This was amongst the last photos I took with my old Lumix FZ200, the zoom process of which was already misbehaving.

Opposite the west entrance of Westminster Abbey is a tall marble and stone column, erected in 1861 and designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, which remembers former pupils of Westminster School who died in the Crimean War 1854-56 and the Indian Mutiny 1857-58. At the top is a figure of St George slaying the dragon, carved by J.R.Clayton, with statues of St Edward the Confessor, Henry III, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, carved by J.Birnie Philip. Four lions flank the base ...

It’s interesting that monarchs feature so prominently on a war memorial. By the time of WW2, the statuary either commemorates commanders, or their dead commandees. You don’t get pictures or sculptures of the former on memorials devoted to the sacrifices of the latter.

And, given that monarchs are involved, it’s an interesting selection of monarchs. I wonder who would have come fifth. Henry of that number? I further wonder, did the worship of Henry V only get into its stride rather later? With that Olivier film, made during WW2? Meanwhile, Henry III has faded in public esteem.

By the time of later British military dramas involving Napoleonic France, which would still have been personally remembered at the time this memorial was erected, the recognition all went to the likes of Nelson and Wellington, and the King’s brother, with the mere King himself getting very little public credit. The statues reflect this.

My meeting tonight will be Nico Metten talking about libertarian foreign policy, i.e. about decidedly different foreign policies to the ones alluded to in this War Memorial.

I really like this description of where cool came from. I don’t think I agree, but I like the way the guy puts it:

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even. Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

… there seems to me to be something especially nasty about free, comfortable people choosing to decide questions of overwhelming historical and moral significance as if they were arguing about hemlines.

That’s in my penultimate paragraph, underneath my final subheading, “MORALITY AND STYLE”. My point being that morality trumps style.

To put that in the language of cool and uncool, what I was getting at was that being an uncool anti-communist was good. But being a cool pro-communist, or (almost as bad in my opinion) a cool anti-anti-communist, was evil. And good and evil matter a hell of a lot more than cool and uncool.

I think that “cool” can be a virtue, related to the idea of “grace under fire”. Cool, can, that is to say, overlap with virtue. You can be cool while being – cool about being - good, or at least non-evil.

Cool and evil can go to hell, that being where it belongs. But when Instapundit’s Ed Driscoll says, of that Michael Kelly quote, “spot on”, I disagree. I don’t regard cool as being, in and of itself, evil. It often is. But it often isn’t.

But, what do I know? The thing is, this is an argument about the meaning of a word, and the meaning of a word is often controversial. To know what a word means, you have to know about how it is used. Knowing how you think it should be used is not the same thing. All I can say is that in my conversational circles, cool is not necessarily wicked.

I am quite prepared to believe that in Sinatra world, cool did indeed become very wicked indeed.

This morning I was out and about in the greyness and gloom of Victoria, and the more entertaining things I saw was this guy, wearing a suit. And a swimming cap. He was talking with a guy wearing a Santa elf hat, outside a pub, and inside the pub was a table full of more guys in strange headgear. Mr Swimming Cap and Mr Elf had to be part of that. Some kind of office or re-union pre-Christmas get-together, presumably. With a strange headgear theme.

Click to get the bigger picture. I now wish I’d got more of the suit.

I like how the hat is wrinkled, like an alien in a cheap and ancient SF movie, before this kind of thing was done properly.